(FORTUNE Magazine) – In The Disuniting of America (Whittle Direct Books, $11.95), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. takes on the hot topic of multiculturalism in a lively 83-page essay. Like other titles in its ''Larger Agenda'' series -- which Whittle mails to a select group of 150,000 ''opinion leaders'' -- you won't find Schlesinger's latest work in bookstores. But you can order it at your local Waldenbooks or by calling 800-284-1956. The dean of American historians finds many advocates of multicultural education ''unscrupulous hucksters'' and ''zealots.'' The dollar bill still may proclaim E Pluribus Unum, as Schlesinger notes more than once, but Pluribus is now hogging the spotlight at Unum's expense. History books are being rewritten to pander to the pride of every Tom, Dick, and Hakeem. Soon texts will be so ''correct'' politically that they will be wrong factually. We are, he says, inviting a cultural civil war that could leave us as Balkanized and traumatized as the Soviet Union, Guyana, Cyprus, and other nations that have tried and failed to digest a Whitman's Sampler of races and ethnic groups. SCHLESINGER reserves special fear and scorn for Afrocentrists, whom he accuses of confusing history with psychotherapy: ''The theory is that . . . telling black children how marvelous old Africa was will make them work harder and do better. But does study of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome improve the academic record of Greek-American and Italian-American children? Not so that anyone has noticed.'' Elsewhere he contends that ''if some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.'' The time has come, he says, for Western culture to take off its gloves and defend its own unique virtues. The West ''needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those 'sun people' who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it . . . who still keep women in subjection . . . who show themselves . . . incapable of operating a democracy . . . and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Bokassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights.'' Fair enough. But what makes this book hard to take quite as seriously as its author intends is a near-complete lack of scary facts. America may be coming apart at the seams, but the evidence for that isn't presented here. Yes, Portland, Oregon, has a ''coordinator of multicultural/multiethnic education'' on its payroll. Yes, Leonard Jeffries, professor of Africana studies at the City College of New York, tells students that the ice people (that's Europeans) brought death and destruction into the world because they lacked happy-go-lucky melanin in their skin. And yet, the Republic endures.

IN FACT some of Schlesinger's evidence suggests that the melting pot, far from being cold, is still bubbling away: ''When Vista, an English-language monthly for Hispanics, asked its readers what historical figures they most admired, Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt led the list, with Benito Juarez trailing behind as fourth, and Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. tied for fifth.'' Schlesinger seems unsure how much damage multiculturalists have really done, or how many people really take them seriously. At one point he says the multis ''have remarkably advanced the fragmentation of American life.'' Elsewhere, however: ''I doubt that the ethnic vogue expresses a reversal of direction from assimilation to apartheid among the minorities themselves.'' A final question: The book makes history out to be the supreme adhesive of American life. Is it? Does it glue Wongs and Saltonstalls together better than Roseanne, Paul Harvey, the Superbowl, or Big Macs? Sports, songs, movies, fads, jokes, food, making fun of Canadians -- perhaps these are the ties that bind. One needn't know the life of Henry Ford to drive a car; one needn't have read The Federalist Papers to be an American. Having seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington twice will do nicely.